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SaaS negative keywords are the search terms you add to Google Ads campaigns to prevent your ads from showing to people who will never buy your software. For B2B SaaS companies, a well-built negative keyword list is not a nice-to-have optimization. It is the single highest-leverage action you can take before spending your first dollar on Google Ads. This checklist covers over 150 negative keywords for SaaS Google Ads campaigns, organized into seven intent categories so you can implement them in minutes instead of discovering them over months of wasted spend.
Below, you will find every category broken down with the specific terms to exclude, why each category matters for SaaS and B2B advertisers, and implementation guidance to make these negative keywords work across your entire account structure. If you have ever looked at a search term report and wondered why job seekers, students, and open-source enthusiasts are clicking your ads, this is the fix.
Free-tier seekers are the most expensive waste category in SaaS Google Ads campaigns because they click at high rates and convert at near zero for paid products. Every SaaS advertiser bidding on product-category keywords will attract searches that append "free" to the query.
Add these 20 terms to your negative keyword list before launch:
free, freeware, freemium, open source, open-source, opensource, no cost, gratis, free trial alternative, free version, free forever, free tier, no credit card, free download, free software, community edition, free alternative, free plan, zero cost, unpaid
Someone searching "free project management software" has already self-selected out of your buyer pool. They are not evaluating your pricing page. They are looking for a product that costs nothing, permanently. Even if your SaaS product has a free tier, these searchers are not the users who upgrade. They are the ones who max out free limits, submit support tickets, and churn before generating a dollar.
The math is brutal. If your average CPC on broad match SaaS keywords is $8 to $15, and 10% of your clicks come from "free" variants, you are burning hundreds or thousands per month on traffic that will never close. This is especially true in B2B SaaS where deal sizes are larger and sales cycles are longer. The intent mismatch is total.
One nuance: if you run a product-led growth motion with a genuine free tier designed to convert, you may want to keep "free trial" as an allowed term while still excluding "free alternative" and "free forever." The distinction is between someone looking for your trial and someone looking to avoid paying anyone.
Job seekers are the silent budget killer in SaaS Google Ads. When you bid on terms like "CRM software" or "marketing automation," Google will match you to people searching for jobs at CRM companies and marketing automation roles. These clicks cost the same as buyer clicks, but they will never convert.
jobs, job, careers, career, hiring, hire, salary, salaries, resume, CV, interview, recruiter, recruiting, recruitment, job description, job posting, glassdoor, indeed, linkedin, work from home, remote job, internship, intern, job opening, employment
The problem is worse than most SaaS advertisers realize because job-intent queries often look commercially relevant at a glance. "Marketing automation specialist" could be someone searching for a tool or someone searching for a job title. "Salesforce administrator" could be a buyer or an applicant. Google's broad match and phrase match will happily serve your ads to both.
Job seekers also tend to click at relatively high rates because your ad copy sounds relevant to their industry. They land on your page, realize it is a product page, and bounce immediately. You pay for the click, get no conversion signal, and your smart bidding models get polluted with bad data.
For SaaS companies running campaigns around their product category, adding these 25 terms as account-level negatives eliminates an entire class of waste from day one. This is one of the reasons fixing rising CPL in SaaS often starts with structural changes rather than bid adjustments.
Technical queries attract developers who want to build, not buy. For most SaaS products, developer-intent traffic represents people who will never purchase a subscription because they are evaluating whether they can replicate your functionality themselves.
API, SDK, documentation, docs, tutorial, GitHub, gitlab, bitbucket, code, coding, script, library, framework, npm, pip, repository, stack overflow, stackoverflow, source code, developer tools
This category requires the most judgment of any on the list. If your SaaS product has a developer audience and your go-to-market includes API access as a selling point, you may want to keep "API" and "SDK" as allowed terms. But for the vast majority of B2B SaaS companies selling to business buyers, these terms attract people who are not your customer.
The "tutorial" and "documentation" variants are especially wasteful. Someone searching "project management tutorial" wants to learn a concept, not buy a tool. Someone searching "CRM API documentation" is already a developer working inside a system, not a decision-maker evaluating new software.
The judgment call: review this list against your actual ICP. If your buyers are technical founders and engineers, trim selectively. If your buyers are VPs, directors, and ops managers, add the full list without hesitation. When in doubt, add the negative and monitor your search term reports for any legitimate traffic you might be blocking.
Students searching for course material, assignment help, and certification prep will click SaaS ads aggressively because your product category overlaps with their curriculum. They have no budget, no buying authority, and no timeline.
course, courses, certification, certified, training, class, classes, assignment, homework, thesis, dissertation, university, college, student, academic
These queries become especially problematic for SaaS companies in categories that double as academic subjects: analytics, project management, accounting, marketing, human resources. A search for "marketing analytics" could be a VP evaluating tools or a student writing a paper. Without these negatives in place, Google treats both the same.
The cost compounds because student traffic tends to have high click-through rates on ads that promise solutions and low bounce rates on landing pages that explain concepts. Your analytics will show engagement that looks healthy on the surface while your pipeline stays empty. Smart bidding algorithms may even learn to pursue more of this traffic because engagement signals look positive.
Add these 15 terms as account-level negatives for any SaaS product where the category name overlaps with academic disciplines.
Competitor brand terms are the one category on this list where the right answer is not always "exclude." Sometimes bidding on competitor names is profitable. Sometimes it is a money pit. The decision depends on your positioning, your landing page, and your cost per acquisition targets.
[competitor name] login, [competitor name] support, [competitor name] status, [competitor name] pricing, [competitor name] careers, [competitor name] stock, [competitor name] IPO, [competitor name] CEO, [competitor name] news, [competitor name] outage
The rule is straightforward: exclude navigational and non-commercial competitor queries, and evaluate commercial competitor queries on their own merits. Someone searching "[Competitor] login" is already a customer trying to access their account. You will not convert them with an ad. Someone searching "[Competitor] pricing" might be evaluating alternatives. That is a different story.
The terms above are the navigational and informational variants you should exclude immediately. They represent people who have zero interest in switching. For the commercial variants like "[Competitor] alternative" or "[Competitor] vs [Your Brand]," run them as separate campaigns with their own budgets and landing pages. Track them independently. If cost per acquisition is within range, keep them. If not, add them to the negative list.
For B2B SaaS specifically, competitor brand campaigns tend to have high CPCs and low conversion rates because the searcher already has a specific product in mind. Calculating the true incremental value of brand-adjacent bidding is essential before committing budget.
Informational queries attract people in research mode who are months away from a purchase decision, if they ever buy at all. For SaaS companies running performance campaigns with cost-per-lead or cost-per-demo targets, these searches burn budget without producing pipeline.
what is, how does, definition, define, meaning, wikipedia, explained, explanation, overview, introduction, history, history of, types of, examples of, difference between, vs, versus, compare, comparison, infographic
Two important caveats before you implement this list wholesale.
First, "vs" and "comparison" terms can carry commercial intent when paired with specific product names. "CRM comparison" is informational. "[Your Product] vs [Competitor]" is commercial. Use these as phrase match negatives at the campaign level rather than exact match at the account level, and carve out exceptions for high-intent comparison queries you want to capture.
Second, if you are running a content marketing strategy alongside paid campaigns, you may want to bid on some informational terms in a separate campaign with its own budget and lower CPA expectations. The key is never mixing informational traffic with your core conversion campaigns.
For your primary SaaS Google Ads campaigns targeting demo requests, trial signups, or sales calls, these 20 terms should be excluded. The intent gap between "what is marketing automation" and "best marketing automation for mid-market" is enormous, and your budget should only fund the latter.
These are the trickiest negatives on the list because the queries look commercial on the surface. Someone searching for reviews or coupons is technically in a buying mindset. But the conversion data tells a different story for most SaaS advertisers.
coupon, coupons, discount code, promo code, voucher, deal, deals, cheapest, cheap, bargain, G2, Capterra, TrustRadius, review site, best free, top free, budget, affordable, lowest price, price comparison
Coupon and discount seekers are self-explanatory. If your SaaS product does not offer publicly available discount codes, every click on a "[Your Product] coupon code" search is wasted. Add the discount-related terms without hesitation.
The review aggregator terms require more thought. "G2," "Capterra," and "TrustRadius" as negatives prevent your ads from showing when people search for your product on those platforms. Since those platforms have their own organic listings and paid placements, your Google Ads click is typically redundant. The user is going to the review site regardless.
"Cheapest" and "budget" exclusions are critical for SaaS companies with mid-market or enterprise positioning. If your average contract value is $500 per month or higher, someone searching for "cheapest CRM software" is not your buyer. They will click your ad, see your pricing, and leave. You pay for the click and get nothing.
The exception: if you compete on price as a core differentiator, keep "affordable" and "budget" in your allowed terms. For everyone else, these are clean negatives.
Having a list of 150 negative keywords is useless if they are implemented incorrectly. The difference between account-level, campaign-level, and shared list implementation determines whether these negatives actually protect your budget.
Create three shared negative keyword lists in your Google Ads account:
The first list is "Universal SaaS Negatives." This includes the free, job, student, and informational categories. Apply this list to every campaign in your account. These terms have no commercial value for any SaaS campaign regardless of structure.
The second list is "Technical DIY Negatives." This includes the developer and GitHub terms. Apply this to campaigns targeting business buyers. Exclude it from campaigns specifically targeting technical personas if that is part of your go-to-market.
The third list is "Low-Intent Commercial." This includes review sites, coupons, and budget terms. Apply selectively based on your positioning and pricing tier.
Shared lists are easier to maintain than campaign-level negatives because you update them in one place and the changes propagate everywhere. Google Ads allows up to 20 shared negative keyword lists with up to 5,000 keywords each, which is more than sufficient.
If you are launching a new SaaS campaign today, implement in this order: free and open source first (highest volume waste), job intent second (most invisible waste), informational third (broadest reach), and then the remaining categories. This order maximizes budget saved per minute of setup time.
Your negative keyword list is never finished. Google's matching algorithms evolve, new search patterns emerge, and your campaigns will surface waste you did not predict. Set a calendar reminder to review search term reports every two weeks for the first three months, then monthly after that. Look for any query that generated clicks but no conversions, and add new negatives accordingly.
This ongoing maintenance is where many SaaS teams fall behind. Recognizing the warning signs that your Google Ads strategy needs a structural change often starts with neglected search term reports that have accumulated months of waste.
Implementing a comprehensive SaaS negative keyword list does not just save money on wasted clicks. It fundamentally changes how your campaigns perform because it changes the data your bidding algorithms learn from.
Google's smart bidding strategies (Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize Conversions) learn from every click in your account. When your campaigns are full of job seeker clicks, student clicks, and open-source enthusiast clicks, the algorithm learns from garbage data. It optimizes toward audiences and queries that look like your converting traffic mixed with your waste traffic.
When you remove 150 categories of waste from the top of the funnel, every remaining click is a cleaner signal. The algorithm learns faster, bids more accurately, and finds more of the people who actually convert. This is why SaaS companies often see cost-per-lead improvements not just from the direct savings of eliminated waste, but from the compounding effect of better algorithmic learning.
Understanding the requirements for Google's AI optimization to work properly includes feeding it clean conversion data, and negative keywords are the first line of defense.
Building a negative keyword list before launch is the right instinct. Maintaining it over months and years while also managing bids, ad copy, landing pages, audiences, and campaign structure is where most SaaS teams break down. The list you have above is a starting point. Keeping it current across every campaign while scaling spend is an ongoing operation.
groas runs a proprietary engine trained on over $500 billion in profitable ad spend. That engine has processed search term data across thousands of accounts and knows which queries waste money before your account generates a single data point. It does not wait for your monthly search term report review. It identifies and excludes waste patterns continuously, around the clock.
For SaaS companies using the DWY (Done With You) product, the engine handles this execution layer while a senior strategist works alongside your in-house team to make strategic decisions about which exclusions to refine, which competitor terms deserve separate campaigns, and how negative keyword coverage interacts with your bidding strategy. Your team stays in control. The engine and strategist make sure nothing falls through the cracks.
For SaaS companies that want Google Ads fully handled, the DFY (Done For You) product means a dedicated strategist owns your entire account end to end, including negative keyword strategy, search term monitoring, and every other optimization lever. You are not reviewing search term reports. You are not building shared lists. You are getting results while your team focuses on product and growth.
For agencies managing SaaS client accounts, the DIY product gives your media buyers direct access to the groas engine so they can scale negative keyword management across their entire client book without adding headcount.
The gap between a static negative keyword list and a continuously optimized exclusion strategy is where SaaS budgets quietly leak. groas closes that gap with an engine that never stops working and human strategists who know which patterns matter.
These 150 negative keywords are a genuine pre-launch checklist that will protect your SaaS Google Ads budget from the most common waste categories. Implement the shared lists, review search term reports regularly, and adjust as your campaigns scale.
But a list is a snapshot. SaaS Google Ads management is an ongoing operation where negative keywords interact with match types, bidding strategies, audience signals, and landing page relevance every single day. The companies that win on Google Ads are not the ones with the best spreadsheet. They are the ones with continuous execution that adapts faster than the waste can accumulate.
If you have an in-house team managing Google Ads and want the engine plus a senior strategist working alongside them, get started with groas DWY. If you want Google Ads fully handled from search terms to landing pages, apply for groas DFY. If you are an agency scaling SaaS client accounts, start your 7-day free trial of the groas engine. Month-to-month, no long-term contracts, $0 onboarding. groas earns the next month by performing.
A well-managed SaaS Google Ads account typically maintains 150 to 500 negative keywords depending on the breadth of campaigns and match types in use. Start with the core categories: free-intent, job-intent, student-intent, and informational-intent terms. Then expand your list monthly by reviewing search term reports for new waste patterns. There is no penalty for having a large negative keyword list. Google Ads supports up to 5,000 keywords per shared negative list and allows up to 20 shared lists per account. The risk is always having too few negatives, not too many. The key is organizing them into shared lists by category so you can apply them selectively across campaigns.
Negative keywords behave differently than positive keywords. Negative broad match blocks your ad when all the negative keyword terms appear in a search, in any order. Negative exact match only blocks the exact query as written. For most SaaS negative keywords, broad match is the right default because it catches variants you have not anticipated. Use negative exact match only when you want to block one specific query while allowing close variations. For example, add "free" as a broad match negative to block all free-related queries, but use exact match if you want to block "free CRM" while still showing for "CRM free trial."
Negative keywords can restrict your campaign reach if they conflict with your target keywords. For example, if you add "software" as a negative but bid on "project management software," you will block your own ad. Always cross-reference your negative list against your active keyword list before applying. Beyond that specific conflict scenario, there is no downside to a large, well-organized negative keyword list. Fewer wasted clicks mean cleaner data for smart bidding, lower cost per lead, and faster algorithmic learning. The risk of under-excluding is far greater than over-excluding for SaaS advertisers.
Review your search term reports every two weeks for the first three months after launching new campaigns, then shift to monthly reviews once waste patterns stabilize. Google's matching algorithms change, new search trends emerge, and competitors launch products that shift query patterns. A static negative keyword list decays over time. For SaaS companies using groas DWY or DFY, the proprietary engine monitors search term patterns continuously and flags emerging waste before it accumulates. This removes the manual review burden while catching new waste faster than any human schedule allows.
Yes, but with limitations. Google now allows account-level negative keywords to apply to Performance Max campaigns, a change from earlier restrictions. However, Performance Max gives you less visibility into which search terms triggered your ads, making it harder to identify new waste through search term reports. This is one reason SaaS advertisers should build a robust negative keyword list before launching Performance Max. You cannot rely on post-launch search term analysis to the same degree as with standard Search campaigns.
Account-level negatives apply to every campaign in your Google Ads account. Campaign-level negatives only apply to the specific campaign where they are added. Use account-level negatives for universal waste like job-intent and student-intent terms. Use campaign-level negatives for context-dependent exclusions, such as blocking competitor brand terms from your branded campaign but allowing them in a dedicated competitor conquest campaign. Shared negative keyword lists offer a middle ground where you build a list once and apply it to selected campaigns.
It depends on your positioning and economics. Exclude navigational competitor queries like "[competitor] login" or "[competitor] support" immediately because those searchers are existing customers, not prospects. For commercial queries like "[competitor] alternative" or "[competitor] pricing," run them as isolated campaigns with dedicated budgets and landing pages. Track cost per acquisition independently. If your CPA stays within target, keep them. If not, add those terms to your negative list. groas accounts benefit from the engine's pattern recognition across thousands of accounts, which identifies which competitor terms convert and which ones waste budget before you spend months testing.
Smart bidding algorithms like Target CPA and Maximize Conversions learn from every click in your account. When job seekers, students, and open-source enthusiasts generate clicks without conversions, the algorithm absorbs noisy data that distorts its bidding decisions. With comprehensive negative keywords filtering out low-intent traffic, every remaining click represents a cleaner signal. The algorithm learns which audiences, queries, and contexts lead to conversions more accurately and bids more precisely. This compounding improvement in data quality is why SaaS companies often see cost-per-lead drops that exceed the direct savings from eliminated waste.
The 150-keyword list organized into seven categories in this article serves as a comprehensive B2B SaaS negative keyword template. The categories cover free-intent, job-intent, developer-intent, student-intent, competitor navigational, informational, and low-intent commercial terms. Copy the terms into shared negative keyword lists in your Google Ads account, adjust the developer category based on whether your ICP includes technical buyers, and begin building from there. For teams that want this handled automatically, groas maintains dynamic negative keyword coverage informed by data from over $500 billion in ad spend, so exclusion lists stay current without manual work.
